The Conundrum of Childish Adults

During last year's defamation trial between actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, audio was played of an incident during which, having admittedly struck him, Heard flung at Depp what she clearly believed was the ultimate insult.

"You're a f*cking baby," she snarled. "You're such a baby. Grow the f*ck up!"

For many of us, that insult rings all too familiar.

What is it about immaturity, even perceived immaturity, that sparks such rage?

Try this experiment: Google "depression." Your search results will yield sympathy-spurring personal accounts, scholarly studies, self-help guides and crisis hotlines.

Google "emotional immaturity."

These results, as I learned just now, skew comparatively, unforgivingly derisive. "Narcissism = Emotional Immaturity," runs a typically disdainful headline, alongside dozens more including "5 Signs of an Emotionally Immature Person," "5 Signs of Low Emotional Maturity," "6 Warning Signs of Emotional Immaturity," "8 Signs of Emotional Immaturity," "10 Signs of an Emotionally Immature Person," "12 Childish Behaviors That Ruin Relationships," and so on.

These otherizing, demonizing declarations are written neither by nor for emotionally immature adults, but always about them. Childish adults — typically in the form of parents or partners — are cast in these articles as strange toxic specimens infesting the environment. The same tone might pervade content about spiders or poison oak, but with more scientific data.

"If your partner has some of these annoying habits," one listicle warns, "they may be emotionally immature."

"Dealing with an emotionally immature person can be quite frustrating," laments another. "Such people are ignorant, lack empathy, exhibit impulsive behavior, and are short-tempered."

You can almost hear the sirens blaring: Steer clear! Human poison! As a childish adult, I conclude: We're loathed.

A Complex Picture With No Clear Etiology

Even in more scholarly content, experts characterize emotionally immature adults as self-absorbed, explosive, unempathic, argumentative, remorseless, rigid, boundary-invasive, overconfident, impulsive, fearful and unself-aware.

Not all childish adults — nor all children — have all those childish traits. Some of us display some of them and/or other childish traits that can be described less pejoratively — such as insecurity, passivity, fragility, performativity, naiveté, avoidance, pessimism, hypervigilance, anxiety, procrastination, self-hatred and being quickly overwhelmed.

Depending on our innate personalities, actual childhoods and a thousand other factors, many childish adults are empathic to the point of chronic self-denial, quiescent to the point of always letting others have their way, self-conscious to the point of crippling rumination and remorseful to the point of vicious self-recrimination and self-harm.

The rude, bombastic, narcissistic childish adult is an easy cliché that obscures a bigger, multilayered picture.

If adult childishness can result from not having acquired certain social skills which were dislodged or blocked by family protocols or childhood trauma, and if adult childishness can result from having been raised — often amidst chaos and inappropriate behaviors — by childish adults, then childish adults merit sympathy.

I say this as a childish adult who was raised by childish adults for whom I have struggled, mainly vainly, to find sympathy.

Yet, interestingly, even experts tend to villainize childish adults, subtly or sharply. We're the enemies. We're seen as system failures, accent on the fail.

The Childish Adult as An Alien Other

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But why? Are we more loathed than other sufferers because of what I call our "alienity"?

At first glance, childish adults resemble normal adults. We wear suits and speak boomingly. We shave, drive, cook and work — well, most of us.

What's weird about us is not instantly apparent. We don't advertise our differences by bringing dolls to work or eating baby food — again: not most of us.

So, like invasive sci-fi aliens, we seduce ordinary adult earthlings into thinking we are just like them. It's only when they "get to know" us, when they let childish adults into their lives, that they start recognizing how bizarre we are.

Then do they feel betrayed? Bamboozled, conned — as if we've tricked them purposely, for our own selfish needs?

Their vitriol, in articles and insults such as Amber Heard's, imply that we choose to be as we are, churlishly refusing to change. Their angry, mocking finger-wagging implies that they think we think we're clever: that we want to sulk and stomp and dodge responsibilities while adult-adults cure diseases, launch missiles and pull their weight.

Yes: Life is easier for childish adults in some ways. We evade many situations that others have no choice but to face. Yet life is harder for us too in ways our haters cannot comprehend. Some of us hate ourselves as much as they hate us. We flee, but many of us are adult enough to recognize our cowardice. We sense its cost to us and others, thinking: Is it possible to die of shame?

As biological adults, we lack the luxury of actual children's innocence and ignorance. To some extent, we know. Our stranded, strangled adult parts can sometimes sense what's wrong, realizing that we cannot quickly make ourselves mature, whatever snap-your-fingers magic that might take.